 So hi everyone, my name is Dr. Gina Heathcote. Welcome to our webinar from the Centre for Gender Studies here at SOAS. I'm going to talk in this webinar on the MA in Gender Studies and Law, which hopefully you're all going to come and join us for come September later on in this year. So the purpose of today is to give you a little bit more insight into how the Gender Studies and Law program works, but also the Centre for Gender Studies as well. In addition, if you want to send me a question while I'm talking, please do just type in a question and I'll do my best to give you an answer while also getting through the script and the slides that I have already prepared. So really lovely to have you join me. Sorry if I'm just a floating voice, I really look forward to seeing you in person in September. So I am Dr. Gina Heathcote and like the Gender Studies and Law program, I am actually split across two departments. So the Gender Studies and Law program was something that I designed that really, I really wanted to reflect my passion for both gender studies and for law and I am split. I work in both the School of Law here at SOAS as well as the Centre for Gender Studies and of course if you enroll in the Gender Studies and Law program you will also be taking courses both in law and in gender studies. So a little bit about the Centre because although you will be working in both Gender Studies and Law at SOAS, your home, your institutional home will be the Centre for Gender Studies. We're kind of small in terms of permanent staff but we do have Centre members across all of SOAS which is one of the things we're most proud of, every discipline at SOAS has colleagues working on gender and sexuality and you will have access and work with many of those during your time studying with us. So in terms of permanent staff our current Centre Chair is Professor Nadia Ali and actually that's her in the photo with women in Kurdistan, work that she was doing, research that she was doing, working with Kurdish women actually in southern Turkey this time although she's also worked with them in northern Iraq. I am a Gender Studies and Law convener so I run the program and if you have any academic questions or concerns while you're here I'll be the person that you come and talk to. Dr Winoa Keach is the MA in Gender Studies program convener and will also be the convener of your core course gender theory once you arrive. And Dr Ali Oshatuda is the MA in Gender Studies and Sexuality convener and also runs some fantastic modules that you can pick up as optional modules on your degree. So as I said although we are for permanent staff in the Centre for Gender Studies we're incredibly well supported by our Centre members so if you go on to the Centre for Gender Studies website you'll see not only our core staff but also members coming from every department and discipline at SOAS and these please help us in various ways sometimes they give guest lecturers, they're heavily involved in our events program which we'll talk to you towards the end, talk about at the end and they also provide dissertation supervision, specialist dissertation supervision for our students if they're working on an area that we feel would benefit from specialist expertise of our colleagues. Okay in terms of administrative support we also have a dedicated Dept. Officer for Gender Studies Vianne Hilley and you can see her contact details there, she's wonderful support to both Centre staff and Centre students, nothing's too difficult, there's nothing about her, she doesn't know that she can't help you with. If you have a question, an admin question already feel free to send her a drop or a line on the genderstudies at soas.ac.uk email address, she actually is one of our former students so you can also when you get here talk to her experience about being as her and actually she was a law student so she has a great insight into this particular degree on gender studies and law and has taken many of our courses on this particular program. Okay so a little bit more about the Centre both in terms of how we're organised and what we do but also how we approach gender what we think about and I want to kind of tailor this a little bit to the Gender Studies and Law program in particular. So the Centre for Gender Studies runs two different types of postgraduate programs both the taught degree which is what you'll be enrolling on and postgraduate research degrees so Doctoral Studies in Gender Studies and we like to keep you know a real kind of connection between the two programs you'll meet many of our research students quite a few of our Master's students go on and become our research students so if that's what you're interested in let us know early on and we'll make sure you have the information you need for that to happen. We actively promote the research community not only with our students but through bringing in our Centre members to present their research either in through events or through as I said before this lecturing. This makes a fantastic dynamic community working on both gender and sexuality at Sylas. I'm really proud that a good number of those colleagues are actually working in the School of Law and the work that they're doing on gender and sexuality it definitely enhances the work that you will encounter the research community that you encounter here at Sylas and this really allows an interaction for students and staff. We see everyone as kind of engaged in an intellectual project rather than this kind of sense that you're the students where the start. We organise lots of events, social activities for our students and we like to try and give you a kind of an entrenched connection to different kinds of community organisations and media activists as well but beyond that I think what's important and what's distinct about Centre for Gender Studies and certainly for me coming from more of a legal background is the way that we approach gender. So we approach gender you might have guessed already in an interdisciplinary fashion we don't think gender belongs as a kind of analytical tool in a single department or discipline and in fact what we're interested in is not only that gender emerges across the different disciplines but how that can kind of really lead in contemporary interdisciplinary studies and research and we hope that that becomes part of the work that you do here obviously being on the gender studies and law program you will be moving between two disciplines all the time and I always say to my students when we're in the law school that understandings of gender sexuality and law tend to lag behind some of the contemporary gender theory and I think that that allows you to really produce cutting-edge writing on particularly feminist legal theories but also the study of gender and sexuality in law something that's increasingly important given the attention that both states and international institutions are now paying to gender and sexuality. In addition to this we regard gender as intersectional and by that I mean gender as a power relationship that is engaged produced and understood or could only be understood through thinking through gender's intersectional relationship with other power relationships particularly race, class, sexuality, ableism, religion and in taking an intersectional approach we think about voice, we think about who speaks, we think about privilege and we think about how focusing only on gender potentially sustains certain types of privileges for some women and really alienates other women so you spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to take seriously a serious and intersectional approach to gender that is derived from an understanding of how power operates in our communities. Furthermore, SOAS is an institution and Centre for Gender Studies in particular are interested in how we decolonise knowledge in the contemporary projects on decolonising knowledge. What does it mean to decolonise gender and sexuality? Who's going to be listening to what kinds of materials in your classroom? How are you encouraged to think about your privilege and access to materials or knowledge structures? So we think a lot about production of knowledge and gender's role in that and how gender might also be a space of harm violence through that so civilising discourses in particular. At the same time through some of our fantastic modules on sexuality you will be exposed to both study of queer and trans theories and I hope it goes without saying that our approach is ground in thinking through gender and sexuality from non-western starting points acknowledging non-western feminist histories, their entrenched stories and knowledge that are sometimes dismissed and for me in international law sometimes ignored or silenced and thinking about what how they challenge dominant forms of gender or feminist theory. Okay so I want to go through the program structure so as you probably know we run a number of different M.A. programs, M.A. in gender studies, a pathway in the Middle East, M.A. in gender and sexuality but what I'm going to go through today is the M.A. in gender studies and law. This is just to give you a better understanding of how it works so you are required to while you're here at so as take on 180 credits the first 60 of those will be assigned to your dissertation which is due in the summer after you finished your studies. In addition to that you have to take 120 taught credits and I'm going to go through those in a moment but I just want to tell you and I hope that you're already aware but part of the M.A. in gender studies and law requires you to attend the pre-sessional law course so this won't accrue you any credits but it is compulsory for anyone that has not previously studied law. So if you've studied law and you have a kind of sense of legal analysis and legal research skills please get in touch and I can give you an exemption from the course but I find that even people that have studied law before enjoy coming along it's co-taught to all our M.A. in law students so you meet a lot of the students that you're going to be working with during the year starts on Monday the 10th of September and concludes on the 21st of September so two weeks of lectures that you come in you're not assessed at the end but it really gives you an insight to how to work with law hopefully demystifying what it means to undertake legal studies in any law school but particularly here at SOAS. Now in addition to that you are required to take a number of core modules the first main core module which all of our students take including our research students in our first year is the gender theory and study of Asia Africa and the Middle East. This is a year-long course as I said everybody takes this course it's a fantastic way to get to know all your fellow students it's taught by Dr Alina O'Ketch it's challenging it's engaging our students give us lots of great feedback about this particular very bespoke course you'll also have a weekly tutorial where you have this opportunity to really think more closely about some of the readings and the knowledge that's being discussed in the lectures. Now because your gender studies and law students you are also required to take an additional half module as a core course and this is the gender sexuality and law theories and methodologies course which runs in term one. I run this course and I run it together with my colleague Vanja Hamzig and we think through the development of gender theory feminist legal theories study of sexuality in relation to law and it's there to give you a kind of strong theoretical and methodological understanding of what it means to take gender theory to law because of course once we come to law we have sometimes more pragmatic goals that might be refined by the very constraints of law and we think about what law is and options gender law reform offers we think about some of the law gender law reform we might already know about. Of course that's paired with the second gender and sexuality in law course called selective topics which you could take as an optional module. You are also required to take a dissertation methods in GEM studies module in term one. This is a great course where you work with Dr O'Ketch to really think about what your dissertation is going to be both focused on and what are the requirements for a dissertation, what are the different ways of kind of writing a dissertation. You do a presentation on your dissertation topic of course it might change and then you submit a proposal for your dissertation as the assessment for that course which is sometime that assessment happens sometime in February and allows you to get some feedback from centre staff about the quality of your proposal what you might do next readings for example. Now in addition to all of those core courses and the pre-sessional course you're required to take 30 credits from the Gender Studies List one which you can see on the website. So these are gender studies modules that are either taught by Centre for Gender Studies colleagues or by colleagues in other disciplines but that have said sexuality and gender are the kind of core of their focus. And then because you are gender studies law course law students you are required to take 30 credits from a law list. Now this is kind of revised every year and these are courses that we think work well for the program and if you've got some questions about that please drop me an email. I'm more than happy to advise you. I know the course as well I can really give some guidance or send me a question now even and then it's not an optional but actually compulsory element of the degree is to then submit your dissertation with just 12,000 words for a law student slightly longer than other gender studies dissertations and the reason for that is because law modules tend to require you to do a footnote method rather than in text citations. We'll talk to you about that a lot more once you arrive. So a little bit more about the dissertation. As I said 12,000 words for MA and gender studies and law students your supervisor will be allocated from the CGS staff list or as I mentioned before it might be that we think that your research area would benefit from working from one of our members to the centre who might work particularly in that area for example my colleague Vanya Hunzik who teaches on the gender sexuality law course takes on quite a few dissertations for us mostly because he works on issues around sexuality in South Asia but also working in archives and thinking about colonial histories of gender and sexuality in Africa. That's quite specific work and we think that people benefit from working with this fantastic colleague. You design your topic and then we support you in framing that topic and putting that together. It should relate to your studies at SOAS and hopefully also engage the SOAS regions but the SOAS regions include diaspora communities so it could be looking at issues of race for example in diaspora communities in the UK or Europe. After you've finished the dissertation in gender studies module you've done a presentation on your dissertation and you've submitted your proposal you then we encourage you to work with your supervisors through both tab two and tab three. The expectation is that you would have three meetings with your supervisor really to help design the project to think about you know is it too broad can you bring in specific kinds of readings and talk about some of the ideas and the framing of it. The expectation is that then you go ahead and write it on your own over the summer with a deadline in September and we give you plenty of guidance along the way you certainly don't have done your own for that. So last of all I want to talk to you about what perhaps is harder to capture. I'm sorry this slide's a bit messy but on the website but I think it's such an important part of coming to SOAS to study gender studies and that is our event series. So the one that's most important I think for our master students is the CGS Seminar Series. This is a hugely popular seminar series, it happens every fortnight in term time and is particularly there for our master students. In fact we expect you to attend the seminar series on Thursday evenings and through the seminar series we hope that we can enhance your experience here at SOAS encountering research knowledge from key scholars working on the SOAS regions and their diaspora and working across topics on gender sexuality law which I think is the real focus across the three different programmes that we run here at SOAS. In addition we have planned for March next year fantastic conference called Gender X is being run by my colleague Adioshtituda and also Dr Rahul Rao who's one of our colleagues Centre for Gender Studies member and also politics department colleague and so this Gender X will be is a study of how gender and sexuality gender identity sexual sexual identity are understood in the SOAS regions a kind of decolonisation decolonising knowledge project that thinks beyond Western tropes around gender and sexuality. If you can't wait then I really encourage you look up Queer Asia they have a Facebook page they're on the SOAS website this is an annual conference that some of our former students run every June so it's a great opportunity to come and meet some of the both staff and students here at the centre and the Queer Asia conference happens next Tuesday on campus starts with fantastic keynote in fact Banya Hamsik is one of the keynote panel that happens next Tuesday in the 26th I think of 5pm at SOAS. It's the former master's student of ours that did gender and sexuality degree along with one of our current research students have put this together four years ago and it just gets bigger and more fantastic every year so do come along if you're in London and you can make it. Great so that's about all that I've got to say really looking forward to seeing you in the last week of September but actually I'm going to see you before that because if you come for the pre-session or we will have a lunch where just gender studies and law students get together and talk about you know and I can answer any questions or feel free to send me an email you know anytime and I'll come back to you. Thanks very much for listening see you in September.